“You’ll see,” Natalie said. “Sidney even has the hands of a musician.”
I enjoyed the lessons, but they ended a few months later, when we moved to Detroit.
Otto’s proudest boast was that he never read a book in his life. It was Natalie who instilled the love of reading in me. Otto was concerned because I enjoyed sitting at home, reading books I took from the public library, when I could have been out on the street, playing baseball.
“You’re going to ruin your eyes,” he would keep saying. “Why can’t you be like your cousin Seymour? He plays football with the boys.”
My Uncle Harry went further. I overheard him saying to my father, “Sidney reads too much. He’s going to come to a bad end.”
When I was ten years old, I made matters worse by starting to write. There was a poetry contest in Wee Wisdom, a children’s magazine. I wrote a poem and asked Otto to send it to the magazine to enter it in the contest.
The fact that I was writing made Otto nervous. The fact that I was writing poetry made him very nervous. I later learned that because he did not want to be embarrassed when the magazine rejected my poem, he took my name off it, substituted my Uncle Al’s name, and sent it in to the magazine.
Two weeks later, Otto was having lunch with Al.
“The damnedest thing happened, Otto. Why would Wee Wisdom magazine send me a check for five dollars?”
Thus, my first professional writing was published under the name of Al Marcus.
One day, my mother came running into the apartment, breathless. She hugged me and exclaimed, “Sidney, I’ve just come from Bea Factor. She says you’re going to be world-famous! Isn’t that wonderful?”
Bea Factor was a friend who was reputed to be a psychic and there were many acquaintances of hers who verified it.
To me, it was wonderful that my mother believed her.
In the twenties and thirties, Chicago was a city of noisy elevated trains, horse-drawn ice wagons, crowded beaches, strip clubs, the smell of the stockyards, and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, where seven mobsters were lined up against a wall in a garage and machine-gunned down.
The school system was run like the city—tough and aggressive. Instead of “show and tell,” it was “throw and tell.” And it wasn’t the students who were throwing things; it was the teachers. One morning, when I was in third grade, a teacher was displeased by something a pupil said. She picked up one of the heavy glass inkwells that were set on each desk and hurled it across the room at the student. If it had hit him in the head, it would have killed him. I was too terrified to return to school that afternoon.
My favorite subject in school was English. Part of the class assignment was taking turns reading aloud from a book called the Elgin Reader that contained short stories. We would turn to a story by Poe or O’Henry or Tarkington, and I would dream that one day the teacher would say, “Turn to page twenty in your reader,” and lo and behold, there would be a story written by me. Where that dream came from, I do not know. Perhaps it was an atavistic throwback to some long-gone ancestor.
The tenth floor of the Sovereign Hotel was the neighborhood’s ole swimmin’ hole. Whenever possible, I would take Richard there to play in the pool. He was five years old.
On this particular day, I deposited him in the shallow end and I swam to the deep end. While I was talking to some people, Richard got out of the pool, looking for me. He came to the deep end of the pool, slipped and fell in. He went straight to the bottom. I saw what had happened, dove down, and pulled him up.
No more ole swimmin’ hole for us.
When I was twelve years old, in the seventh grade at Marshall Field grammar school, in Chicago, I was in an English class where we were allowed to work on our own projects. I decided to write a play about a detective investigating a murder. When it was finished, I turned it in to my teacher. She read the play, called me to her desk, and said, “I think this is really good, Sidney. Would you like to stage it?”